A Refutation to Geoffrey Bennington’s Critical Interpretation of Bataille’s General Economy

06/16/2021

Let’s start by lying out Geoffrey Bennington’s critique of Georges Bataille line by line:

1. “[U]necessary luxury … is in fact, on his own terms, generated by a certain giving in to a falsely perceived necessity, namely the supposed necessity that it be luxury and not necessity that poses these very problems … ‘general economy’ is not the other of ‘restricted’, but is no other than restricted economy; that there is no general economy except as the economy of restricted economy; that general economy is the economy of its own restriction — and that this is necessity and not luxury. What is necessary is not the fact that luxury and not necessity be the truth of economy: the necessity of necessity is not luxury, as Bataille claims, but rather the luxury of necessity is still necessity. Another way of putting this is that general economy is the economy of general and restricted economy, and that this is part of the economy of restriction … Bataille’s argument for the necessity of luxury goes as follows: any circumscribed system receives more ‘ecstasy’ from its surrounding milieu than it can profitably use up in simply maintaining its existence … This restriction or, as Derrida would call it, stricture or striction, means that the attempted generalization of economy beyond the bounds of the restricted is itself part of the economy of restriction, or of economy as restriction”.[1]
2. “The sun, as pure gift, is pure gift to the extent that it stands outside this finite terrestrial system (but can only be conceived of as pure gift from within that system: Bataille’s account is itself limited by this tellurocentrism and eventually anthropocentrism — if we really attempt to talk about the general economy of energy in the cosmos, the sun cannot of course be thought of in this essentially traditional and even metaphysical way”.[2]
3. “In order to talk about excess … Bataille needs to posit limits … Limits as restrictions to growth (the determination of growth as finite) are produced only because the world is round … [because t]he earth has a finite and continuous surface … [we need] to reproach Kant — and indeed Bataille — here for not envisaging the possibility of interplanetary or even intergalactic travel in the starry sky above my head … Bataille’s ‘general economy’, then, is in fact restricted, as in Kant’s, by a closure identified with the spherical form of the earth, or at least by its being a closed finite surface”.[3]

Now for my responses:

1. All Bataille is doing is making the descriptive claim that luxury is the root of economic problems. It is not that it must be or that it is necessary that this latter descriptive claim is true, rather, even if necessity was the root of these economic problems, luxury would still be. Now, this isn’t because general economy is restricted economy but rather general economy is the truth of restricted economy. There is no attempt at generalizing the economy beyond the restricted, general economy is not the generalization of the (restricted) economy.
2. Bataille does not view the sun in the more metaphysical as well as occidental way. His sun is a “black sun” that escapes conceptualization. It is the death of God. The earth is not a privileged domain in the sense that Bataille sees it as more important than other planets. Rather, Bataille only looks at the earth because it is all there is to look at until or if we find new conscious and living entities in space.
3. The earth is currently the limit of the human race. So, currently, Bataille’s thesis holds true. But it must be realized that after or if we get past the limit of the earth, then we have the solar system, then we have the galaxy, and then eventually the universe. What we see here is that life always meets a limit. Now, following Bataille’s cosmology, one cannot hold the position that the universe is constantly expanding as one cannot make claims of form about the formless universe.

References

[1]: Geoffrey, “Introduction to economics I: Because the world is round,” in Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), pp. 46–57, 47–53.

[2]: Ibid., 49.

[3]: Ibid., 49–53.

Bibliography

Bennington, Geoffrey. “Introduction to economics I: Because the world is round.” Essay. In Bataille: Writing the Sacred, edited by Carolyn Bailey Gill, 46–57. New York, NY: Routledge, 1995.